Tavern of the Blue Hand

Diablo 2 MUD? What Happened?

Ages ago, I played a fun mindless mud known as Diablo 2 MUD, I believe. Had the endless dungeon delving, random equipment, uniques like Diablo. Also incorporated some Diablo 2 classes. I truly miss it and wanted to waste time on it again. Anyone know what happened to it? I remember playing a chain lightning mage.

The reason it is mentioned here is that last part of the source code is a randomly generated maze which is different every game. The author explains how thye code works, and with inform7's strong point being that the code is almost in the English Language.. it may be understandable and easy to translate to MUD code of some kind for anyone who wants to make their own Diablo type mud.

I also remember Evaryn had randomly generated dungeons, but that is another that has sadly shut down

What I'm more interested in are random generated mazes that generate the same every time, based on an input seed. So I can generate a maze for player Bob and another for player Frank, and have them different. But Bob's maze will always be the same every time I generate it.

That allows me to generate the mazes on the fly, rather than having to create the rooms beforehand (which means literally everyone can have their own mazes) - it also lets us do some more fun stuff. A maze doesn't have to be, well, a maze of tunnels. It could be a randomly generated town. Maybe every PC is able to go back to their hometown, and walk around. You don't want buildings moving around between visit, but nor do you want to save the rooms from every PC's town, if they might only visit once.

We're partway through implementing something like this, we call it "virtual rooms" - where only one room is created, but it is created differently based on their location. When they leave the room, the system secretly puts them back into the same room, but describes it differently (and fills it with different objects) based on the "new location" that they've moved to.

I'm hoping to use it to allow an unlimited sized world to explore, and to allow players to make real changes to the world. If they each have their own town, then they can have quests that make long term changes. A quest to build a windmill, for example, might leave a windmill in their town forevermore. And that windmill might mean the town is more prosperous, and grows (i.e. the maze is regenerated with different parameters) - and the quests available might also change or be added. The end result might be the players visiting a thriving city, where once it was just a farmstead.

And, of course, players should be able to visit each other's towns. Burn down your rival's windmill, etc. (which will give your rival new quests. "Help us rebuild the windmill!" "We're hungry, please bring food" etc.)

What I'm more interested in are random generated mazes that generate the same every time, based on an input seed. So I can generate a maze for player Bob and another for player Frank, and have them different. But Bob's maze will always be the same every time I generate it.

I've considered using that approach for things like alchemy, to prevent players from sharing their recipes OOC, but it seems a bit strange for world creation. I do have randomly generated mazes, and yes they're created on the fly - but I want them to be different each time the player visits, I don't want players learning a fixed layout.

I do also use a fixed seed for generating large amounts of the world, but in this case I want the world to be the same for everyone, otherwise you could end up with some strange scenarios such a player swimming through the ocean and meeting another player who's walking through the forest - one player would see someone walking on water, while the other would see someone swimming through a forest!

I guess it might be useful for instanced quest areas though, as then players could learn the area without giving away the locations of different things. But for player-owned towns, I would rather let the players design the layout themselves (within reason).

Quote:

Originally Posted by silvarilon

We're partway through implementing something like this, we call it "virtual rooms" - where only one room is created, but it is created differently based on their location. When they leave the room, the system secretly puts them back into the same room, but describes it differently (and fills it with different objects) based on the "new location" that they've moved to.

That sounds like the approach I used for my two wilderness systems. It worked pretty well, although my obsession with persistence resulted in the rooms getting pretty cluttered in my second version. That was also one of my stepping stones towards a roomless design, as I came to realise that the virtual rooms weren't really necessary.

Quote:

Originally Posted by silvarilon

I'm hoping to use it to allow an unlimited sized world to explore, and to allow players to make real changes to the world.

My second wilderness had over a billion rooms, and players could change them by digging tunnels, mining resources, laying roads, building houses, sowing fields, etc. My playerbase, tiny as it was, used the tools I'd given them to write their names or crude messages across the landscape in huge letters.

In my current mud I only allow players to modify their own worlds. I still like the idea of letting them change the main world, but I've learned to fear the consequences.

As an aside, I thought Diablo2 was a very cool game, and it provided a lot of inspiration for my mud.

As it happens, I actually ended up with Diablo 2 Mud.
What happened though was that everything that was added after Act 2 got lost on some server issues, so the quests and areas from act 3-5 are all gone, as well as most of the classes apart from warr, mage, and rogue.
It's on a disc around here somewhere - I've been trying to find it.

The guy who made it ended up redesigning it after that to incorporate .hack elements and cut down on the building side of things, and called it .Dimension. I took over that after awhile, and ran it here for a couple years. If you're still interested, I could put it back up to play on I guess.